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Google Protocol Buffers, where have you been all my life?

So two weeks ago I discovered Google’s Protocol Buffers, and I have to ask, where have you been all my life?

The project I was working on requires speed and scalability, both vertically and horizontally.  The component I was working on is a C++ daemon that listens for HTTP requests and returns an XML document.  It needs to be able to handle tens of thousands of requests per minute as its a control process.  The first version of this application was written in PHP for speed of deployment and flexibility.  Now that the product is mature, its time to go through some of the code and replace the PHP code with C++ code.

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New Myth Frontend - Almost Perfect

A few months ago we moved into a new place with a much smaller living room, it didn’t have nearly enough room for a full size computer case in the room. So it was time for a new, much smaller frontend for our MythTV setup.

Size, noise, and being able to “hide” it are the primary concerns with this new setup. The backend box is elsewhere and connected to the house network via a ZyXel 500Mbit powerline ethernet adapter. The new frontend is also connected via a ZyXel powerline ethernet switch. Wireless is an option, but its not stable enough or fast enough for me. There was another problem with wireless that I’ll mention later.

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Migrating from GFS to GlusterFS

This week I started the process of migrating from GFS to GlusterFS.  The hardware running my GFS cluster is older and I decided it was better to replace it than continue maintaining it.

Background Information

Back in 2003 I needed to find a storage solution that was fast, reliable, and fault-tolerant.  It also needed to be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously.  After doing much research, I ended up going with an IBM FAStT 600 2GB Fibre Channel (FC) based storage system.  The intent was to replace a single server running a JBOD SCSI disk chassis and RAID-5 card acting as an NFS server.

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Open Source and other nuggets

The silence for the last few months has been because my life got crazy.  I’ve been spending a lot of time working and what hasn’t been working has been spent in preparation for our new baby.  Yes, thats right, baby.  In 2006 we were told by a fertility doctor that we would likely never have kids.  We didn’t figure it out until less than a week before Jessica entered the second trimester.  So thats been consuming all of my weekends getting the nursery (strange calling it that) and the rest of the house ready for the new baby.

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Remote Desktop on Xubuntu 9.10

So I was planning to work from home on the Friday after thanksgiving so I wanted to be able to access my work desktop from home just in case.  Normally I just ssh and use terminals and such, but for some reason I decided I wanted a full desktop.  I use Xubuntu at home and at the office, and there is no default VNC setup like there is with Ubuntu and Kubuntu.  A couple of quick Google searches and I came across this post:

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MediaTomb revisited

As I mentioned before, I keep coming back to MediaTomb, playing with it for a few hours and then going back to uShare.  Not this time.  For the last couple of days I’ve been reading a lot more on the MediaTomb wiki, particularly the scripting pages.

I’m not sure why it wasn’t obvious to me before, but somehow I’d managed to keep overlooking those pages.  Using the scripting I was able to create a hierarchy almost exactly what I wanted.  I just wish there was an option to prevent the  “PC Directory” from being sent to the renderers.

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